My Idea of Joe's family values

When I first started reading Joe Amato’s Family values I really didn’t know what it was I was reading. There was so much information being given I found it hard to understand what it was he was trying to explain. After reading a few other peoples writings in this class I thought his would be the same. The most interesting thing about his writing is that he likes to jump all over the place when talking about his family history and this can sort of throw the reader off. Yet after reading his story the whole way through I kind of feel like that may be part of his point. The ideas that he touches on are things I have been thinking about in my writing as well.

The main thing that comes through across his entire work, which spans a large part of his life, his this idea that the literacy language that has been weaved into his and his families lives was one that had a strict set of rules that didn’t cater to the population as a whole. It left his family out in the cold so to speak. He hints that this is the reason for some of the major problem in his families lives especially his father. His dad had been through a lot and he was an intelligent man but one of the hardest things for him to understand was why he had to fill out one of those “damned” welfare forms as he put it. Joe then really began to explain the true meaning of what it was that his family had never learned about. This lack of knowledge that had left his father, a fairly intelligent man, confused about what it was he was doing with his life.

The idea that the social classes that make up this world and further more the people who make them have no intentions of creating an equal learning ground for those in the lower social classes. Joe went on to explain that his father had never been exposed to this idea, never was taught the concept, that he was on a lower level than other and was taught a specific way that probably never catered to his needs. It left him to feel that everything that had happened to him was his own fault and the burden of his problems was his own doing. It’s a sad truth that Joe describes so purposely and it really makes you think about the way the world is today.

Has anything changed since Joe’s fathers’ time or are we still taught and limited within these same social constraints? Maybe it’s the fact that now at least we have the knowledge that we can go beyond our own educational system to better ourselves if we so choose. We are still confined to the same of learning in the same social classes but we are at least encouraged, if we are so lucky to have a teacher to do so, that we have the ability to break free and move beyond the strict educational ways and move into a more freely based learning experience. Like Joe my ideas may be all over the place but that is because I have decided that the strict learning regiment will not tie down my ability to be a creative thinker.